Brother William's hormonal heat for my high school girlfriend Carmella lasted even longer than my own, but he never got beyond his doggy attempts to hump her leg on the sly during the year Carmy and the Cheer Leaders adopted him as a mascot.

Gee was his first human lover and he was a little more advanced with her, but he had still been primitive enough , that......... after a few months of fireworks on the Roof of Goldwin Smith Hall, and nymphing though the gorges from Bridge House to Brooktondale......he had been able to walk off without notice or goodbye.

His cool stiff-arm, enabled him to make occasional use of women who imagined they could keep him as a pet, a curiosity, or a cause. But just about always, either he or the woman.... one of them would actually fall in whatdoyoucallit with the other, and would run out in flames or wake up in ashes.

On the Dog's Plot four or five acres, and in the brush land and pasture land surrounding us we have the Rose that grew at the doorstep of the original homestead house and, then some seedlings I brought here from Ithaca along with Rose of Sharron, which is not a Rose at all, and then out back in the orchard and conspiciusly out on the cattle range, there are occasional multi flora, roses with there simple, small, and multitudinous flowers...a generally unpopular escape from Gardens, and then the Roses that we used to call Swamp Roses because they grow in my native swamps up north, along the lake shore, and beside streams. We call this place Dog's Plot, and because these pink, sometimes white, simple Roses are abundent here, arching, abounding, I began referring to them as Dog Roses, and was then very surprised when my friend Der Rosenmeister, that Dog Rose was really the official English name for those Roses. Several sub species exist, and so do Swamp Roses, which are something else. And of course Dog Roses turn out to be more than special; magical and possiblly world saving, according to Wiki and Nature Enquirer, as soon as they get the news. But just look at these Dog Roses. That is all you know, and all you need to know. Truth is beauty and beauty is truth, and sleeping Dogs never lie. The last picture in this series shows a Pear Tree trying to come up in the pasture. The cattle prune them down to the thorny parts, so they stay dwarfed, as they do in the hay fields, waiting to spring up like the Cayuga's from whom they descend, by way of French Jesuit Missionary gardeners, then surviving the great Sullivan massacre, by sprouting from their roots. Everybody should do that.

I love my scythes and I abuse them terribly with my over-enthusiasm, which every once in a while comes up against hard objects. Each of these two twenty four inch ditch scythes have been broken three times and welded twice. The welds themselves held, but I will be retiring these two now, ordering a new ditch scythe or two, and hacking with my brush scythe for the time being.